A Yorkshire Tragedy, not by William Shakespeare January 7, 2010
Posted by cathrynsymons in : Reviews , 2 commentsJust after Christmas, little Maisie Copland, 4, and her mother Julie Harrison were killed by the child’s father apparently because he was angry that the mother had left him. What drives men like this, and with a few well-publicised exceptions it is men, to destroy the people they should be most carefully protecting? This most awful of crimes has happened ever since we’ve had families, and in 1605 William Claverley of Claverley Hall in Yorkshire was executed after he killed two of his sons, and tried to kill their mother. It is that tragedy, which shocked Jacobean England, which is the basis for this short play.
Nine young players of Tough Theatre take on over a dozen characters in the tiny theatre space behind the White Bear pub on Kennington Park Road. The floor is covered in straw, with signposts for each location and a few wooden boxes making up the set, which is reshaped by the cast between each scene.
The role of Husband, a man who has gambled away his family estate and blames all his own failings on his long-suffering wife, is played by Lachlan Nieboer, who is well worth watching out for. He’s an unsympathetic character, narcissistic and unwilling to take any responsibility for his situation, who sees killing his family as a kindness, saving them from penury. Even at the end, forgiven by his wife (Jacobean co-dependency, I think) and apparently repentant, its hard to have much regard for him.
The play shows us the motivation behind the crime, but its hard to know what to do with that insight. What can be done about woman-hating self-absorbtion?
Charlotte Powell is the Wife, a woman who takes ‘for better or worse’ a little too seriously. She’s not deceiving herself – she knows what he is, and how badly he is treating her, has friends and lands of her own, but still stays with him to the very end, more loyal to him than even to her children. And sadly that’s not an unusual story either.
Given the subject matter, its no surprise that the play is quite unrelenting, and I left the theatre feeling rung out. When first published, the name William Shakespeare was on the cover, but that’s been fairly definitely discredited. If nothing else, surely the Bard would have leavened it with a little humour or jollity?
This is not an easy play to watch, but it is well presented and challenging, and definitely worth seeing. A Yorkshire Tragedy runs to 24 Jan at the White Bear Theatre.
Rope, at the Almeida December 29, 2009
Posted by cathrynsymons in : Reviews , add a commentPatrick Hamilton is a playwright and novelist who’s work has been a little neglected over the years, but seems to be coming back into favour almost a century after his original rise to fame. Rope, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, contends with Gaslight to be his most famous. It’s time I read that copy of 20000 Streets Under the Sky
As the play begins, two Oxford undergraduates have carried out a vicious murder simply to entertain themselves, and are making their friends unwitting extras to a Nietzchean nightmare. We see intellectual arrogance untempered by compassion, set in the early 1920s as social butterflies flit over deep postwar grief.
Blake Ritson is a controlled, tense Wyndham Brandon, the ringleader of the pair, self-confident and without remorse. At times, he’s so convincing he’s magnificantly hideous – you know he’s a monster but he almost leads you into his world. His nemesis is Rupert Cadell, played by Bertie Carvel, in a subtle performance of a character who’s war experiences have scarred him, but added depth.
Alex Waldmann (Charles Granillo, the second murderer) seems to be everywhere lately, and is slowly growing on me. His Sebastian in the Donmar’s start-studded Twelfth Night was fairly innocuous, and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t particularly register him in Hamlet. He was very good in Shraddha at the Soho Theatre recently, and here gives us a bundle of nerves, who probably never really wanted to be involved but has past the point of no return. Just as you think he’s going to explode, he calms down again, backwards and forwards, pumping up the tension.
As the play builds to its denouement the tension becomes almost unbearable, with Granillo quietly losing it behind a chair while Brandon and Cadell argue the value of life, murder and its punishment. I don’t want to spoil it, but was relieved that my expected final twist did not arrive, and so society at least is redeemed.
Rope is staged in the round, though this adds little to the play and obstructs some sightlines. It’s not a good idea to open the large lid of a chest, then do plot-explaining things behind it while hidden from 10-20% of the audience. Seat E4 was certainly restricted view, and not in the normal Almeida sense of a 15cm pole which can easily be avoided. Still, it was very cheap, so I’m not complaining.
Rope plays at the Almeida until 6 Feb 2010 and is well worth seeing. Note that the seating configuration shown in their online booking isn’t what’s actually in the theatre for this production. If you’re worried, it might be better to call the box office.
Life is a Dream at the Donmar Warehouse November 9, 2009
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , add a commentI wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this one. Wordy seventeenth century Spanish philosophising, in translation, a TV star male lead whom I’d never seen. Expectations, and reviews, were mixed (the Guardian and Telegraph liked it, the Indy was ambivalent).
The first impression is the set, all black with a gold leaf backdrop nearly a map of the world and three concentric rings around a moorish lantern. In the background, Ansuman Biswas sings.
The King of Poland has a son, Sigismundo, whom he has imprisoned from birth, trying to stop the astrological prediction that he will be a cruel king from ever coming true. Meanwhile, Rosaura arrives from Muscovy with her servant Clarion, intent on avenging the slight to her honour given by Alfonso when he promised to marry her then left for Poland to woo Estrella, his cousin and joint heir to the throne. Rosaura and Clarion see Sigismundo in his woodland prison, and are found by his gaoler, who is supposed to execute them. As he is secretly Rosaura’s father, he doesn’t want to, and so takes them to the king. There’s a little of As You Like It’s Rosalind and Touchstone in Rosaura and Clarion, and they stumble through the wilderness.
When the King decides to release Sigismundo and give him a chance to prove the prophecy wrong, Sigismundo fails utterly, killing a courtier and trying to rape Rosaura. The King has him returned to prison, and told that it has all been a dream. Shortly, rebels arrive to free Sigismundo, urging them to lead him against the King. He takes up their offer, war ensues and he wins. Eventually, all are reconciled, and various marriages take place.
Dominic West is a brilliant nearly-sane Sigismundo, from despair and grief at his imprisonment early in the play, through the ferocity of his first time of freedom, to the dignity of the final soliquy.
The question of the play is not plot, who ends up with whom, but the far deeper ones of free will, whether we can rise above destiny and the true nature of life. At first Sigismundo is prisoner of his stars, but later pulls himself onto a path he chooses. Kate Fleetwood’s Rosaura may regret not being more careful what she wished for, and Lloyd Hutchinson’s poor Clarion is just collateral damage.
Helen Edmundsdon’s translation switches from Elizabethan phrasing to modern idiom, making the language easily understood and emphasising the contrast between the chivalrous courtly life of the aristocrats and the more down to earth simplicity of Clarion, the ordinary servant.
I didn’t know, but might have guessed, that these lines of Sigismundo’s soliquy are Spain’s ‘To be, or not to be’:
| Yo sueño que estoy aquí destas prisiones cargado, y soñé que en otro estado más lisonjero me vi. ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño: que toda la vida es sueño, y los sueños, sueños son. |
I dream that I am here burdened with these imprisonments I dreamed that in another state I saw myself more happy What is life? A frenzy What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction And the greatest good is small: For all life is a dream And the dreams, they are dreams. |
The middle of the front row at the Donmar Warehouse is the best place in the house, though you need to book early to get there. Life is a Dream runs until 28 November, and must be seen.
Speaking in Tongues November 8, 2009
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , add a commentOne of the joys of live theatre is the way an ensemble piece grows and develops during the run. A company working a repertoire builds an organic thing far greater than the original parts and, at its best, culminates in the magic that was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Histories Cycle.
In the six weeks between my first outing to Speaking in Tongues at the end of its preview period and my second last night, the four-person cast of John Simm, Kerry Fox, Lucy Cohu and Ian Hart have gone from giving us a well-executed, gripping thriller to something mesmerising.
Speaking in Tongues is a complex interplay of nine characters whose intertwined lives explore marital and extra-marital relationships in early middle-age. Adultery may imply a lack of love, or not. It may be easier to wish a partner dead, than simply to leave. Some broken hearts never mend, and some may never get close enough to have the chance. The couples share the stage, having private conversations with each other, sometimes speaking in tandem, sometimes seperately.
Kerry Fox, the New Zealand actor who first made her name as the disturbed genius Janet Frame in Angel at My Table, gives us the nervous, disappointed Jane, lacking self esteem and regretting her childlessness, then switches to the more confident but deeply troubled Sarah who lets men become dependent on her and then rejects them.
John Simm, of Life on Mars fame, starts and finishes as Leon Zac, the urbane policeman slightly overawed by his successful wife who has a one night stand with Jane, and in between plays Nick, falsely accused of murder.
Lucy Cohu, who I saw most recently in Channel 4’s Cape Wrath with David Morrissey, plays Sonya, who doesn’t sleep with Jane’s husband, and leaves Leon when he confesses, and then Valerie, child abuse victim and psychotherapist. Finally Ian Hart is Jane’s husband and then Valerie’s.
Simm and Fox particularly have that remarkable talent of completely changing their physical appearance when they switch roles. Plain Jane and professional Sarah would barely appear the same if standing side-by-side.
The rapport between Simm and Cohu, the couple who’s love survives infidelity, is so strong you’d think they were off-stage lovers (though I’ve no idea of or wish to comment on their private lives), and seems to have grown during the run. In a similar way, the sad chill between Fox and Hart as Fox confesses that she doesn’t trust him as she feels she should is heart-rending.
This is an intelligent, complex drama delivered with fulsome depth, and is highly recommended.
Speaking in Tongues runs at the Duke of York’s until 12 December. Seats F16-17 in the stalls gave a good view though tonight’s in C11-12 was better. The theatre wasn’t completely full, and there are bargains to be had. And many thanks to the nice people who run the facebook group for the free tickets I won.
Is Climate Change a Religion ? November 5, 2009
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , add a commentTim Nicholson, formerly the Director of Sustainability at the property firm Grainger plc is clearly a sincere and strong believer in the dangers posed by climate change, and when his former boss told him to get on a plane to bring his forgotten Blackberry over to Ireland, Nicholson rightly felt he was being treated with contempt. The boss sounds like an utter prat, and you have to wonder why he ever bothered to hire a director of sustainability in the first place.
He won a victory of sorts this week when a judge ruled that ‘a belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations.’
Its good that he’s managed to get some satisfaction (and compensation) out of this situation, but I’m not sure that this is a victory to be welcomed.
Under The Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003, it is considered harrassment if an employer does something, because of an employee’s beliefs, which violates the employees dignity or creates an ‘ intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for ‘ the employee.
The judge also set out some criteria by which a ‘belief’ could be included under the regulations.
• The belief must be genuinely held.
• It must be a belief and not an opinion or view based on the present state of information available.
• It must be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life.
• It must attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance.
• It must be worthy of respect in a democratic society, not incompatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.
Humanism would fit, being a Jedi Knight would not.
There is no need for the belief to be, in any sense, true. Of course, if it did, then we would have the the courts trying to establish religious matters which, while probably entertaining for some, would be a disaster.
The notion that a belief in climate change should come into this category is a troublesome one.
What happens when someone has a perfectly genuinely held belief which doesn’t fit rational evidence – a belief which most of us would consider just plain wrong. Perhaps a medic believes that homeopathy works, and feels insulted if their colleagues don’t respect that?
As a result of this ruling, the climate change sceptics who think its ‘just a matter of belief’ will be vindicated.
Of course, the answer is that no employer should violate their employees dignity or create an intimidating environment for any reason. This is a dubious regulation, and the ruling helps noone.
Save Tourism Concern October 15, 2009
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Travel , add a commentTourism Concern is a small charity which focuses on human rights issues in tourism, and is particularly concerned with the rights of indigenous populations in tourist destination countries.
If you’ve had a holiday in the Maldives, been on a gap year volunteering programme, or just done the bucket and spade thing on a Costa, Tourism Concern has been involved.
Over the years they’ve done great work to improve the impact of tourism, and move it closer to an ideal vision of tourism that benefits the host community and provides a happy, enriching experience for the tourist.
They’re a force for good in an industry which is often very far from that vision, so I am sad to see it reported in the trade press today that they are likely to fold this year if they can’t raise more finds.
Please, donate, buy the latest edition of their excellent Ethical Travel Guide, or at least pass this blog post on to your friends!
Bloody Poetry
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , 1 comment so farThe White Bear in Kennington Rd doesn’t really look worth the trip to the wilds of South of the River, with big Sky sports screens, and a few locals nursing pints. Hidden in a back room though, is one of those tiny studio theatres that pubs with a room to spare and a few eager theatre companies throw up. Two rows of bench seats around the walls, lights, action!
Tonight, it was Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry, a feast of Byron and the Shelleys. We start with their first meeting, on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816. Shelley (Richard Holt) is there with his mistresses, Mary Godwin (Ellie Turner) and Claire Claremont (Felicity Davison). Byron (James Russell) has a putative biographer, the deliciously slimy William Polidori, played by Alex Barclay. The four embark on a relationship which lasts the rest of Shelley’s brief life.
Although the language is often that of the poets, the women are not overshadowed by their talented though severely flawed men. Mary Godwin, later Shelley, is beautifully portrayed by Ellie Turner. I make the mistake of thinking of her as little more than the author of Frankenstein, though that would be enough. Her radicalism as she urges Shelley to ‘live the life’ rather than just pontificating about it, or accepts his affair with Claremont, is clearly stronger than Shelley’s own.
Kate Malyon, who plays Shelley’s first wife Harriet, spends most of the play as a Banquo-like ghost, but her initial performance as she delivers a soliliquy before throwing herself in the Serpentine is spell-binding and moving.
This is a small fringe production in a tiny theatre, but worthy of much more. It was a full house tonight, and well worth crossing the river.
Tickets are £10-12. The show runs until 31 October.
Gagging orders – a thing of the past? October 13, 2009
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Politics , add a commentUpdate at 2106 -The injunction was withdrawn at about one this afternoon, and the Guardian have now published in full. A bit of a total PR CarterRuckup, you might say…
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I’m having great fun this morning, being distracted from my essay by the growing Guardian Gagging Order Scandal. In a beautifully nuanced piece on the front page, the Guardian explained that it had been served an injunction preventing it from reporting anything about a question due to be asked in Parliament this week. It didn’t actually say ‘Bloggers – to your marks!’ but it may as well have.
I read the paper in a cafe at about 9.30am. By the time I got on the computer at 10.15, three facebook friends had already posted the article along with another article in the Spectator explaining what the fuss was all about and giving the question, and a quick check on a couple of blogs revealed a link to the offending report, which seems likely to be the subject of the question.
This appears to be a sad story of an international corporation dumping, quite literally, on the very poor of a developing nation in pursuit of profit. They’ve offered to pay compensation, but the whole thing is likely to become a criminal matter, and clearly the company don’t want the evidence of their wrong-doing to get out into the public sphere. This scandal has been brewing for some months and the Guardian has done sterling work in shining a light in some very dark places.
The new scandal is that a respected newspaper could be prevented from publishing a question to go before parliament. Parliament, for all it’s faults, is public, and citizens have the right to know what goes on there. This horrendous injunction is yet another nail in the coffin of our moribund parliamentary democracy, and the reform of British libel laws must be a top priority for any parliament with self-respect.
This time, the injunction clearly hasn’t worked. As I write, #trafigura is one of the most popular tags on twitter, and three of the top four tags relate to this scandal. Thousands of people, many of whom will never have heard of Trafigura or its unpleasant ways now know about it.
I’d guess that, next time, the injunction will be stronger, and articles like the one this morning will become more difficult to write. Our media laws need a rapid (though well thought out) rewrite to strengthen consideration of the public interest, and, while we’re on the subject, the fair comment defense against libel.
Stick to paper October 5, 2009
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , 3 commentsHere’s why I won’t be turning to e-books any time soon.
Right now, on Waterstones.co.uk, the e-book of Iain Banks’ Transition is £14.09. The hardback is a mere £13.99. And the paperback is only £9.09.
Prices for Iain Banks Transition at Waterstones
I love my books, but they’ve completely outgrown my capacity to shelve them. Particularly for textbooks, I’ll be happy to give EBooks a go when, and only when
- They are a lot cheaper than paper books - about 50-60% of the hardback price.
- I can make notes on them
- I can be absolutely sure that, once I’ve bought an ebook, noone would try to take it back, as happened recently with Amazon’s Kindle.
- There’s an easy way to back them up so I don’t lose the books if I lose the device my reader
- Publishers promise a free upgrade path for my books if they decide to stop supporting the device or format I’ve bought.
In my naive 20s, I paid to upgrade my LPs to CD. I’ve put up with all the clever little software licencing rorts over the years, but with books, that’s enough.
Where does Geo-Engineering fit in? September 14, 2009
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment, renewable energy , add a commentHow’s this for a Dr Who plot? Temperature and sea levels rising, the oceans dying as they turn into an planet-wide acid bath, the last few humans huddle together in the far North plotting an heroic, last-ditch attempt to save the Earth by pumping sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere to recreate the cooling effect of Mt Pinatubo, or setting vast mirrors in space to reflect the sunlight away.
Perhaps more realistic are some of the technologies outlined in the Institute of Mechanical engineers report ‘Geo-Engineering – Giving us time to act?’. This report discusses three technologies which are, more or less, possible now.
- Artificial trees are machines which remove CO2 from the air, similar to the carbon capture devices advocated for power stations. These can be placed anywhere, perhaps beside a motorway, or in the middle of the North Sea, where the carbon captured could be stored in depleted oil wells.
- Growing algae on the sides of buildings would sequester carbon, with the resulting green goop used as biofuel, which could be burnt to biochar and later buried or stored underground, as well as insulating the building and reducing heating costs. Although its hard to imagine these photobioreactors really operating on a global scale, it could allow buildings become net carbon absorbers.
- Finally, the idea of increasing the albedo of buildings to reflect more sunlight back into space is an idea which has been around ever since the first villager in a hot country somewhere figured out limewash and painted her house with it. If applied to our modern sprawling cities, using uptodate highly reflective coverings, it would at least have a local effect.
From a Green perspective, should we just reject these technologies out of hand, or should we consider them as part of a balanced climate change strategy, along with power down emission reductions?
If, over the last 10-20 years that climate change has been seen as a major issue, carbon levels had at least started to come down, I’d say ignore all this. It’s an oil industry conspiracy to keep on with business as usual. But the truth is that the Green movement, party and campaigning organisations alike has been spectacularly ineffective at making any dent on global emissions. In the UK, we’ve reduced ours slightly since Kyoto in 1990, first by putting everyone onto gas heating and more recently by outsourcing our emissions to China. Even with all that, last year we managed a whopping 1.7% reduction.
We need ways of not just reducing emissions but of rolling back the damage already done. We desperately need time to adjust to a low-carbon world. These technologies could give us time, and a way of cleaning up.
The difficulty for any Green is that they could give us more than that. If (and its a big if) they fulfill their promise, then our high-consumption, growth obsessed world could continue a while longer, at least until the next resource blockage is reached.
A Green approach then has to consider a number of factors:
- Will the technologies work? Research spent on something that doesn’t is research not spent elsewhere.
- Will they have undesirable side effects, both environmental and economic?
- Are they sustainable?
- Is there an ethical concern?
The technologies which simply reduce warming (eg all the albedo increasing ideas) a symptomatic fix that does not get at root causes, and do not address the other effects of increased greenhouse gases. In particular, they do not address the problem of ocean acidification. Space mirrors and the like should be avoided, at least until its clear there is no alternative.
However Greens should support the idea of making buildings more reflective to reduce emissions by reducing the need for aircon, and perhaps to reduce local increases in temperature (urban heat island effect). This isn’t likely to have much effect on a global scale (see table 1 in Lenton and Vaughan (2009) ).
The idea of algae-based biophotoreactors should be seriously considered too. Most Green objections to biofuels have to do with the displacement of food crops, particularly in the developing world, and with unknown consequences of biochar. Algae, grown in tubes on the sides of buildings, or perhaps along roadsides or even in highly saline areas, don’t raise this objection. Unknown consequences should be researched, not abandoned in fear.
Because the artificial trees are an air capture and storage technology, and cost the same to capture carbon no matter how that carbon was originally emitted, they will effectively put an upper limit on amount paid for any emission reduction strategy. At the moment, they’re expensive, but it will come down and then noone will want to invest in renewables, changing transport patterns or anything else. If it works, all the other problems associated with fossil fuel dependency – peak oil, dependence on problematic suppliers, use of all those lovely molecules just to burn them – won’t go away.
Greens may therefore be reluctant to consider them, but if they actually work, they will give us time we desperately need. They’re worth a funding bet right now, and perhaps the chance of slowly coming off fossil fuels..
Geo-engineering contains some frightening possibilities, but, as the Royal Society said in their report on the state of the technology last week, we’re as much in danger of prematurely dismissing useful techniques as we are of promoting dangerous proposals.
When our grandchildren ask us why we didn’t just stop burning the oil, I don’t want to have tell them that not only did we see it coming and do very little, we abandoned the search for ways to clean up after ourselves.
